Under The Microscope

DOES GOD PLAY DICE? THE NEW MATHEMATICS OF CHAOS, by Ian Stewart; Penguin, 1997; 401 pp; $27.95

Reviewed by Russell Dear

Like a good detective novel I find the plot of Does God Play Dice? riveting. It leads us on from early attempts at modelling the physical world, past the great 18th-Century scientists who thought they had discovered the immutable laws of a universe that runs like clockwork, to current attempts at understanding chaotic systems such as weather patterns, pulsating stars and organic growth. It is crafted by a writer who has the ability, through anecdote, analogy and copious examples, to make complicated scientific ideas accessible to the average reader.

The book has two distinct themes. To explain the mathematical ideas behind chaos and show it to be both natural and inevitable, and to look at whether chaos models the real world in a useful way. Does it help us understand some of the things we see? Along the way we are encouraged to investigate, in a hands-on way with calculators, ideas such as periodicity and strange attractors until we get to feel that chaos isn't so wierd and exotic after all but is as down to earth as classical mechanics or the calculus.

What I particularly like about Ian Stewart's writing are his delightful anecdotes. One describes the scaling factor 4.6692016090... fundamental to chaos. Ian Stewart notes that prior to 1979, if, in our search for other intelligent life, we had come across a radio signal sending this, we would have put it down to random noise. After 1979 however, when the scaling factor was discovered, we would know that such a signal indicated intelligent life probably more sophisticated than our own. This suggests the question, how do we know that any radio signal received here is not random noise but some universal constant not yet discovered?

For those who read the first edition of Does God Play Dice?, this edition includes three new chapters on applications of chaos reflecting the great deal that has happened in the field since 1989 when the book was first published. It provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to a topical and complex subject.

Russell Dear is a Mathematician living in Invercargill